Geographic restrictions. I live in Czechia. I can afford to pay for content and generally do if I can, but there is quite a lot of content I want that is not available via any content service whatsoever here. For that I sail the high seas.

I lived in china and it was the only way to access loads of media. When I got back I saw the hellscape that streaming had become. We recreated cable. That and not owning anything anymore. So I still sail the high seas. Even if I wanted to pay the high price of 30 different streaming services it’s a better more enjoyable experience sailing.

I’ve been sailing the high seas, or at least skirting the shores, since the late 1980s when my classmates and I were swapping BBC Micro software on 5¼" disks! Moved onto PC in 1990 and carried on. I even cracked a few games back in the day :-) These days I don’t pirate so much, and I have quite a collection of legitimate music and software.

Ideology. every cent a capitalist doesn’t make because of me is a small victory.

I was a truck driver, driving long distances, long hours. I was listening up to 4 audiobooks per week. Audible only offered 4 books per month.

It was the early days of the internet and I liked Metal music.

To get me some legal Metal I had to catch a train to the nearest city for like a half hour trip, then walk around to the tiny metal shop and hope they had the CD I wanted.

And I did that. I bought a CD a week from the local store and went on monthly trips to the City.

But I also got them off torrents. Sure it may take a week to download a track but that meant just leaving my PC on.

So I built up a collection. I copied the CDs I bought. I made track lists of the best songs and made my own compilation CDs and took them to work at Deep Pan Pizza, and we would put them on while throwing pizzas at the customers.

I ended up with a DJ case of copied CDs which is still on my loft. They weren’t all downloaded, but copying media is Piracy, and I made CDs for my friends. Fartknocker Volumes 1 and 2 are still talked about by my old friends because they were full of Bangers.

Now I have a Spotify Family account and every few months they add a quid onto the price. The other day I put on The Global News podcast by the BBC and it had adverts in it! I pay my licence fee for the BBC, they don’t do advertising. Pisses me off.

So now I use Audiobookshelf for my podcasts. Currently I’m curating a music collection I’ve pulled from my old iPod in my car. Not sure it’s feasible to replace Spotify but I can try

When I was learning programming, free software for schools wasn’t (officially) a thing yet.

Lots of folks pointedly looked the other way so I could have a home copy of the development environment I was learning.

Ironically mine started without nefarious connotations… The family computer in the mid 80s was a minor novelty to me for ages, only good for simple text games really. Then…

My brother grabbed a cracked game toward 1990 off a BBS. The game itself I don’t even remember, but it had a cracktro that stunned me. Graphics I’d never seen, actual music out our little adlib card… Was crazy enticing.

Being stuck in the Midwest US while enamored with DemoScene is a hell of a drug. Every few kb down that modem was like crack.

That then opened a new world of games as well… Things my older brother had no interest in. Things my parents obviously would not have allowed. You know… The Good Shit ™️.

Obviously once codecs caught up video and audio quickly became a thing. My closest buddy and I would burn stack after stack of CDs to take a spindle at a time over to share between us and others.

Then the data hoarding set in… What good is just having these shiny things for yourself when you can share? True joy doesn’t exist without spreading it to others.

The sickness persists… Stronger than ever despite becoming a pessimistic old man. Multiple gigabit connections: check. 200tb arrays just for torrents: check. Seed times tracked in years: check.

Remember when 14.4k was the most epic thing for grabbing those disks at lightning speed? I certainly do.

I made bootleg tapes for my friends. I remember Little Feat and The Band were pretty popular choices.

I was in middle school and I saw my friend had all the episodes of ATHF (aqua teen hunger force) and I wanted to be able to get free episodes of stuff. Silly but true.

You can therefore blame the mooninites for my piracy.

I wanted to buy music, but a CD that I got in the 00’s had some “protection” so that I couldn’t rip it and listen to it on my MP3 player.

Now, I ripped it from a Linux computer and had no problems, but was so upset that the record companies tried this. I realized that it’s not about right or wrong, but just about power and money.

I went back to it recently. It’s mostly down to Amazon deciding that paying them was no longer enough, you had to watch their ads as well.

Well now I don’t. I installed Jellyfin, paid up for two years of VPN, and got another HDD. I’m set. I’m all done with asking nicely for a better service so I got my own.

I sub to Spotify because it’s easier than pirating. I’m a creature of convenience. If there was one streaming service that had all movies that have already had their cinema run, and all TV shows, and was all in one UI, and nothing ever got taken off it, and it was a reasonable price (say the price of two current streaming services), I’d probably pay up for it.

But there isn’t. They don’t want to offer it. They all want to be king of their little corner.

Originally, I was too poor to afford software. Then my CD/dvd books were stolen and I couldn’t afford to replace the media I’d been collecting my entire life. I bought an external drive, an s-video to RF modulator, a Bluetooth keyboard and connected my computer to channel 3.

Eventually Pandora and Netflix were released and I stopped pirating. I spent most of a decade buying all of my media. Then I tried to buy a complete set of Good Eats and it wasn’t possible.

There was literally no way to purchase every episode legally. So I took the $500 I was going to spend on that box set and put it towards an ebay’d server and some drives.

By the time the streaming wars started to gain steam, I had everything automated, and was pushing 50TB of storage.

I started because I wanted to get around censorship in my country. I also wanted to view stuff in the original language and here we dub everything.

When i first started as a kid, i just wanted games, shows, movies and music without having to pay for it, as i would not be able to afford it all. First movies from P2P-clients like napster, kazaa and limewire. My older brother taught me what i needed to know to get started with torrenting later, and i built up a great ratio on 3-4 private trackers to get what i needed. This continued until soptify and netflix came along and i had some more cash on hand. The initial service was good enough for me to stop pirating.

So after about a decade of being a landlubber, i started pirating again. The services are fragmented, they treat you like shit and using any of their services is a privacy nightmare. As this dawned on me, i regretted having ever stopped pirating, because now i barely had any stuff at all. I didnt own a thing, and i did not like it. So now i had to spend a lot of time building up a library from (almost) scratch. I have a jellyfin-server running at home with about 600 movies and some of my old favorite shows, while also picking up some of the new stuff that i want. I dont have to sit thru all the bullshit on netflix to find a show/movie i like anymore, and the experience is pure bliss in comparison. Still lacking a bit in the music department, but that is also growing and i again enjoy some of the music i listened to before that is not available on spotify. I dont exclusively pirate though, i purchase some music of bandcamp, games of gog (and steam) and audiobooks of libro.fm.

Next time there is an enticing offer that does not involve downloadable drm-free files, im not falling for it. Fool me once etc etc